The Great Green Scare
By JEFFREY ST. CLAIROctober 3, 2005
With nothing much better to do and an unlimited budget to burn, the FBI is turning its mighty inquisitorial arsenal on environmental groups across the country. Even now the feds are scouring green outfits from Moscow, Idaho to Cancer Alley Parish, Louisiana, looking to round up bands of eco-terrorists, the Osama Bin Ladens of the American outback.
Back in Reagantime the rightwingers smeared environmentalists as watermelons: green on the outside, red on the inside. In those halcyon days, economist John Baden, major domo of a rightwing think tank called FREE and the Svengali of the Sagebrush Rebels, made a small fortune hawking watermelon ties, woven of the finest petro-polyester, to his retinue of oil execs, federal judges and range lords. Now that cap-C Communism has faded into the oblivion of high school history text books, the corporate world's PR mavens have had to concoct a new spine-tingling metaphor to evoke the threat environmentalism poses to their bottom line: eco-terrorism.
Apparently, it's just a short step from al Qaeda to PETA. That's right, the money you save from not buying fur may be going to finance terrorist raids to liberate condemned mink from their isolation cages on rodent death row in Corvallis, Oregon.
Of course, the feds haven't had much luck finding Bin Laden. And our mean-spirited Clouseaus didn't stop any of his kamikazes, even though their own agents shouted out repeated internal alarums. And when the whistleblowing agents went public, the FBI brass cracked down on them, gagged some and gave others, such as the courageous Sibel Edmunds, the boot.
Several of the feds' biggest terrorism arrests have blown up in their faces. In Portland, Oregon, the FBI dramatically seized attorney Brandon Mayfield, trumpeting to the press that the mild-mannered immigration lawyer was a long-distance mastermind behind the Madrid train bombings, a kind of Fu Manchu in Birkenstocks. The feds said the technicians in their crime lab had detected Mayfield's fingerprints on a bag found near the bomb site that supposedly was linked to the terrorists. After several harrowing weeks, he was released by a disgusted federal judge, over the FBI's virulent objections, after Spanish investigators revealed that the fatal fingerprint bore not the faintest resemblance to Mayfield's and, in fact, belonged to an Algerian. Yet another crushing blow to the FBI crime lab.
And after four years, the FBI's snark hunt for the anthrax killer has also come up empty.
So perhaps tree huggers shouldn't sweat these menacing invigilations from the big heat.
Then again perhaps they should worry.
What the FBI is truly proficient at is destroying the lives of innocent people, such as Brandon Mayfield, Judi Bari and Wen Ho Lee. That's when they don't simply kill you outright, as they did to Fred Hampton, the blameless men, women and kids in that house of flames in Waco and Randy Weaver's wife, Vicki, as she held an infant in her arms on the front porch of their cabin at Ruby Ridge.
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